chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) (07/19/90)
A couple of weeks back I promised the comp.unix.xenix readers a summary of my evaluations of DWB for a LaserJet under SCO XENIX 386. Rick's summary lays out most of the sensible alternatives. I'll add a few nonsensible ones for the very cost conscious folks :-) My testing was performed on a system running SCO XENIX 3.2.1. First off, here are the low-cost options which Rick doesn't cover. These will most likely be of interest only to SCO XENIX users. If you've got the text processing package, you've got nroff and a crippled troff, but no reasonable LaserJet capability. If you are a UNIX user, it would be silly to spend the money to get a broken troff when you can get a working one elsewhere for only a little more money. 1) Use nroff. You can cobble together a /usr/lib/term/tabXX table which will drive the LaserJet. This will give you access to roman, italic, and bold in a single font size. You can get half-line motions, and thus play with equations a bit. And if you are really perverted, you can get the special characters. The problem is that the XENIX package is 7-bit - nroff can't generate 8-bit characters, and col will eat them even if it could. My solution was to generate a 2-byte code for the 8-bit characters, the first byte being a flag ('\0177') saying set the MSB of the next byte. A filter follows nroff to do the translation. And "col" is avoided at all costs. If this is of interest to you, I can probably dredge up my old nroff driver table generator and the "colpr" filter which does the 8-bit character hack. 2) Use otroff. The SCO text processing package includes a crufty, old troff which emits codes for a Wang C/A/T typesetter. Thus, your problem is to convert this stuff to PCL a LaserJet understands. Rick's "jetroff" postprocessor does a dandy job of driving a LaserJet, but it only understands device independent troff output. Thus, the problem now becomes translating the C/A/T data to dit. I am aware of two tools which do this. One is called "CAT2dit". It was written Greg Sassenrath and posted to the net a while back. Unfortunately, this does not provide for communication of font metrics between troff, CAT2dit, and jetroff's djet program, and thus the results were unusable. Mike Slifcak hacked on CAT2dit, made it a bit smarter about the fonts provided with jetroff, and cleaned it up to the point where results are now readable, but in my opinion still unacceptable. The second tool is "psroff" by Chris Lewis. I have not used this program myself. However, from the description it sounds like it has a lot better font handling capabilities, and if you are faced with making the otroff work, you might want to investigate this route. Those are the crummy approaches. The sane ones, involve getting a real DWB, and Rick gave a good rundown. I have tried three of the options on his list: - Image Network's xroff - ISC's Text Processing Workbench + jetroff - Elan's eroff + jetroff In all three cases, I evaluated the UNIX/386 version of the package, and used the SCO /usr/bin/coffconv utility to convert the coff executables to x.out format. All things seemed to work fine, except "pic" whereby all versions would dump core on particular files. I have to wonder if there might be an issue with the floating point emulation when you run stuff through coffconv. The cheapest approach is ISC's TPW. However, it gave me the least satisfactory results. You do get a full DWB 2.0 including the nifty preprocessors. However, for some reason the inter-character spacing seemed off a bit. I assume it was either an ISC bug or an ISC/jetroff interaction issue (or a relic of the coffconv conversion). While not optimal, the results were certainly acceptable. And thus if you are looking at the cheapest way to a real troff, this might be a reasonable approach. Be warned, however, if you try to run this on XENIX, the distribution is System V filesystem floppies, and thus you'll need a UNIX machine to mount them and tar up the files for transport to the XENIX machine. I spent quite a bit of time playing around with the Image Network xroff. Of all the solutions I looked at it is strongest in two areas: installation and fonts. I didn't have to mess around with System V filesystem floppies or integrating various pieces together. They *do not* offer an all-singing, all-dancing install script, you just unload the tape and put files where you want them. You will have to manually go in and edit the xroff script for your setup. However, if you feel comfortable with minor shell hacking, then this is no hassle. Configuration scripts are nice if I want to install the software where the vendor wants and the way he or she wants. Maybe someday I'll find a vendor who know my machine better than me, and their install script will work fine. Until that day, I'd prefer the approach xroff uses. (One exception to the above is that you are still going to have to put the tmac.* files in /usr/lib/tmac. Or do as I did - put in dummy files which so'ed the real tmac files.) The other nice point is that Image Network has a very rich collection of good quality fonts included in their package. I ended up deleting fonts because there were so many more than I would ever use. I did find a couple of small bugs (the "i" in 13pt Helvetica is hosed), but on the whole extremely good quality. By the way, the XENIX version is older than their UNIX version, and the font assortment is nowhere as nice. There are a couple of problems with this package. My biggest problem is that the backend is closed, which means you can only use their fonts and postprocessors. If all you want is there, fine, otherwise you are stuck. For example, bitmap inclusion is not supported yet. If the backend were open, I could have put jetroff there and done it that way, but I couldn't. Another minor drawback is that this isn't a full DWB, so you don't get things like checknr and soelim. Nits, but if you need them you need them. The final approach I tried was Elan's eroff. I've avoided Elan for one reason. I thought their font policy was a scam. You spend almost 900 bucks to get a DWB, and surprise, it's a useless piece of bits because there are no fonts. But rejoice! They've seen the light. Recently they've started shipping Times Roman and Helvetica fonts with the package. I haven't seen them, so I don't know how good they are, but I think it's important they provide at least something. Because I didn't have the fonts, I drove the printer with jetroff on the backend to use it's fonts. Finally, everything fell into place. I had all the features I wanted, was getting reasonable quality output, and all the various roff things I've collected over the years seemed compatible. In article <1990Jul13.152632.5779@pcrat.uucp> rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes: >If someone can fill me in on the details I'm missing, I'd appreciate it. Hokay. > - Get SCO Eroff for $895. (408) 425-7222. Don't bother. SCO isn't carrying eroff at the moment. Go right to the source -- Elan Computer Group at 415-964-2200. They have 286 XENIX, 386 XENIX, and 386 UNIX versions for $795, $895, and $895, respectively. > - Get Image Network's xroff. Sorry, I don't have a price. > (415) 967-0542. I have reports that it may be difficult > or impossible to use alternate device postprocessors with > xroff. They have an X-windows previewer. It is $950 for the 2-user version. They have both XENIX and UNIX versions. The XENIX version appears to be behind the UNIX one. I didn't play with the X previewer, but it does sound very nice. Even though I didn't go with their product, they were very helpful and were good folks to work with. So, to make a boring story long, after months of looking around, I decided that Elan was the way to go. Now, I'm in the market for some good fonts :-) -- Chip Rosenthal | You aren't some icon carved out chip@chinacat.Unicom.COM | of soap, sent down here to clean Unicom Systems Development, 512-482-8260 | up my reputation. -John Hiatt